SkyDaemon

I suppose the results of the jump are worth talking about, although my point in bringing up this entire thread was to point out the folly and dangers in playing "expert" when it's entirely inappropriate. This behavior is disturbing and worth mentioning. However, the jump worked out fine. We needed to work on the exit, but were able to take a small delay, deploy the base parachute and do a successful climb to the shoulders, and the final exit. The entire process took a few tries, but once we were able to get the base parachute out, everything went fine. And the failed attempts were clean break offs with no injuries whatsoever. Not even a small scratch, cut, or bruise. :-) find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Ever notice how quickly skydivers are willing to preach their 'expert' advice on jumps they've never attempted? Thus begins my story: Another skydiver and I set out to do a Mr. Bill jump. We arrived to the DZ early to dirt dive, grab a plane, and get up in the air before the sky was full of other jumpers. Word quickly spread through the notorious gossip lines which are threaded all over the DZ, from the pilot seat in the plane to the manifest desk, to the outhouse, to people just arriving on site. Almost immediately I was overwhelmed with excited skydivers all declaring with solemn wisdom and authority the "proper" way to execute this dive. I found this amusing because none of them had ever even tried a Mr. Bill jump, let alone successfully accomplished one. But that detail didn't stop them from declaring their authorative and expert opinion as to how this jump should be done. The air was immediately swimming with opening lines such as "The right way to...", "The only way to...", "You need to...", among plenty of comment and gossip about our dive plan they didn't watch. In the end I was able to explain to each of them (to their satisfaction) why their "expert" advice would lead to bridle wraps, unstable exits, dislocated shoulders, loss of a rig, accidental reserve deployments, among other things. Needless to say, these jumpers hadn't thought through the issues. I bring this topic up, not to berate the intelligence of the average skydiver, but to discuss the important issue of safety. The "smarter jumper than thou" attitude has its place in terms of education. However, beware of the authority with which you speak, and pay attention to the authority with which someone speaks to you. Especially if you're new to the sport. Do not pretend you know more than you do, and always check your facts. And, as always, beware when providing unsolicited advice, or you may discover its true value to your audience. Talk Smart, Jump Smart. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

A metaphor is like a simile. Busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Dave, My boyf, made the graphic, although I get to pipe up and steal some credit as I came up with the idea. :-) I'm currently working on some software that I'm trying to get committed to the FreeBSD project. We'll see if it happens. My day job is that of unix guru/egoist and in my copious spare time *cough* I skydive and BASE jump. What's your story? find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

And it was great! find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Is there a difference between giving someone permission to hurt you and being hurt despite you protest? Is there a difference between starving and fasting? There is, and it relates to choice, approval, and desire. I do agree that personal information stored electronically is practically as good as compromised, however granting permission to use that information for purposes other than the one it was submitted for is morally and legally wrong. Each little step the government takes to increasing its right to use information obtained without permission is a step closer to 1984. You're right the ultimate retaliation of boycotting all electronic means of storage due to their ability to be compromised is impractical. However, realizing it's impractical means regulating the rights of others to misuse that information becomes not less, but more crucial. The government having more power is not the goal of electronic communication, in fact it's a severe and scary threat. Abandoning electronic communication would ensure the government couldn't use it towards its own ends, however citizen protest is another way. --- Check us out at eff.org. We stopped charge for "postage on email", we fought de_css, we keep the government from regulating the internet. Help us out before dropzone.com becomes government regulated. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

ACK! When one starts claiming "but I'm not doing anything illegal" or "I don't mind if 'they' want all sorts of personal information about me, its not like they care." one resigns their right to privacy. One's SSN, ID, face, name, hometown, place of birth, mother's maiden name, number of family members are private. Why should one believe that your personal information won't be passed along to Mr. Ashcroft for background checks? Why shouldn't the NPS cross reference your name, face, and license plate against the information they gather at Bridge Day? Why shouldn't the IRS take a look a closer look at you? Esp considering they have a "war" to fund and BASE jumpers are not known for being on top of the government's "friendly" list. Freedom Day is in Twin falls Idaho and runs on October 19-20th. Its off the Perrine Bridge, which is lower than the New River Gorge Bridge, but still jumpable. Skydiving gear is NOT recommended. No one will ask for your ID, SSN, kids names, your home address, you tax returns, proof of citizenship, or anything else you may think is personal and unincriminating to be made public. It should be a lot of fun :-) See you there. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Tom, Nice fix! Great you're still posting, keep it up :-) find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Justin, You're quite right in that an Operating System is an Operating System and they call have their advantages and disadvantages and unix isn't the "Holy Grail" for all, but it is for some just like windows is the "Holy Grail" for some, and Mac, and Sun, and DEC, SGI, etc, etc, etc. (damn I'm showing my age and nerdiness). Linux is a wonderful hobby and its open source and hoard of contributors makes it a great playground and powerful work environment for those who wish to delve deep into the core of the operating system and who have the brain power required to manipulate it to their needs. A stock install still has advantages over windows in that its offers security features, an open source environment, and several feature which give the end user a lot of control. However linux also has its disadvantages. Its relatively user hostile, the hardware support is not up to par with windows and the amount of support available from manufacturers is largely absent in the linux world. Linux requires the end user to be computer savvy and independent, windows provides a large cushion of tech support numbers, hardware guides, setup guides, and downloadable material. Although things are changing... COM objects and even some of the new .NET stuff has its place. C++ can do some neat things and MS has done some impressive things, but its closed source, tends to run slow, works ok, some of the time, and is inherently insecure. Picking the right OS for the task is what's important. Don't tell your little old mother to install NetBSD and expect her to understand why her TCP stack is causing her grief. Don't ask your paino playing friend to understand how to compile netscape from source. And don't tell your net admin friends that windows is easy to secure and makes a wonderful web server. Pick the right tool for the task. Don't limit your available options, keep unix around, keep sun around, keep Mac around, and even (groan) keep windows around. It has its place.... So about those beers.... we should talk over beers... -=SkyDaemon# kill -9 `cat /var/run/whining.pid` find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Jfields, Nothing personal, and I'm not trying to start a platform fight but... these problems happen quite often in the windows world. Printers are proprietary to their manufacturer, and although they often work via parallel cable, trying sharing them over a windows netbios network with multiple versions of windows. Or attaching them a "print server" so they'll be networked. Or even making them print within the specs they were advertized to be able to. Try finding driver support for the NEC SuperScript 1450N, or some other proprietary printer that one buys at a discount sale. Printers are a headache all platforms get to share. Want rant about it over a beer? :-) find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Erno, The linux implementation of /etc/printcap is relatively well done considering your other options in the unix world. Although understanding it is still difficult. You may try to enter the /etc/printcap entry yourself: /etc/printcap lp0|ps|psc42|Epson Stylus C42:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp0:\ :af=/var/spool/lpd/lp0/lpacct:\ :mx#0:\ :lp=/dev/null:\ :if=/usr/local/lib/stc600pl:\ :sh: As a side note, printer setup projects, are the biggest enemy of all programmers and admins. They all require proprietary drivers, are almost completely unsupported by the manufacturer, and require fine tuning which demands the OS, applications, and printer all be able to talk to one another. However, the printer has no API, is usually undocumented, and isn't made to work with unix. Postscript network printers are you friends :-) You pay more at the store for them, but they really are, almost plug and play and they work well! When you add up the hours you spend trying to make a cheaper model work with parallel or usb, you can easily eat up many hours of effort, often for a result you're still unhappy with, and if you assign yourself a salary of $5/hr, at the end of the week, it would have been cheaper to just get the postscript/network model. Check the newsgroups, mailing lists, man pages, and search engines. Linuxhelp.org has saved me many hours of tweaking. :-) Good luck. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

no apostrophe in "videos" Give a man a fish and he eats today. =-Tell a man he should learn how to fish and you've made an enemy for life=- find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Cool screenshots, simply UI, looks like you have something there. Good luck marketing the software. :-) find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

10,000 users? That's sick man! Congratulations :-) find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

No matter what the circumstances: be it tragedy, success, error, or victory, it will always be BIGGER in Texas. Everything is bigger in Texas: the land, the cars, the buildings, everything! And much the way you don't mention the Panama canal in France, nor Vietnam to the children of the 60s and 70s, nor sea power to the British, you don't mention Alaska in Texas. A few of life's lessons I learned the hard way. Learn from the mistakes of others, and you'll get hurt less. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

attrition.org is great :-) I remember having looked at that awhile ago, but its improved greatly. My boyf and I watched 2600's "Freedom Downtime" which is available off www.2600.com. It was a great film done in the "Roger and Me" style of satire documentry. Something you may get a kick out of if, you enjoy attrition.org. Well belated 25th Happy Birthday! What else do you want to do while you're still young? find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Ack! No I didn't get to jump all weekend, despite the beautiful weather in the Pacific Northwet! How's the new place working out for you? Did you move in yet? I'm glad the links helped if you find any gems, let me know, Its always good to have resources to give people :-) I bet the developers think you're wonderful, as well they should! Its a strange world they live in. So how did you go from the keyboard to the skyboard (well skydiving anyways)? find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Apple is doing some great things with their hardware/software and the technology is becoming more affordable and the unix base of OSX provides some great cross-platform compatibility. Samba, NFS, Apache, etc, all run fine on MacOS X. And the XServe is gorgeous and comes with a kick ass Applecare warranty. Its starting to compete with Sun for the server market, lets see how they do. :-) How do you like OSX? find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

:-) Excellent sentiment. You're one of few I've come accross who is willing to put forth the appreciation for the developers. Sadly many products are raced out the door and upon discovery of several performance and reliability problems are labelled "beta" which the manufacturer's insurance policy. Althuogh a lot of hard work went into the project, it wasn't finished. I think it would be like if the waiter took your dinner away from the cook at the restuarant before he was done cooking it. You would look at the cut of meat, the sauce and realize that if he finished cooking it, it would have been outstanding. Sadly most technology is also "half baked". ;-) As to computers I posted some links on my personal site: http://earth.e-raist.com/~raistlin/synix.html. Its an outdated thing, but has some decent starting points. :-) Any jumps today? Painfully Excrutiating and Retarded Language is the PERL of my life. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Hohonukai, Motorolla's RISC (Reduced Instruction Set) chip is actually a really impressive machine. Its architecture makes is inherently superior for sound and video editing as the instruction set was designed to be able to handle computing small amounts of data very quickly, versus doing complex number crunching. Macs have always had a lot of advantages over their competing CISC (Complex Instruction Set) chips, although I think what you're getting at is the operating system issues. I never figured out MacOS < X. But when I learned OS X ran on top of a BSD based subsystem with a NeXT microkernel, I took a closer look, and found it has a lot of power. I would definitely look into the Macs if you get a chance. And I can't think of anyone who can look at the Apple 23" flat panel and do anything less than drool :-) "The IEEE was an invention of singles bars to get rid of the hopeless two nights a month." find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

You get to play with Sun Enterprise machines? ACK! I'm jealous. A skydiver who uses RISC? (I recongize that was an awful pun, but it was too easy.) I just got my first sun recently, I couldn't afford one, until I started seeing the RIP dot coms selling their assets on ebay. It was then, I realized I can have a sun :-) I now sport a Sun Ultra 10, 300Mhz SparcII. I love it, with Solaris 9. I started my "computer" life with the Tektronix 4051. It was an old beast that used magnetic tapes and weighed about as much as I did at the time. Although as time went on, I learned more and more about "computers", and finally figured I'd stake my claim in the world as a hacker/programmer. So I installed unix... well I tried to install unix. A few months later, I was able to compile C on my first unix machine. I loved it, I couldn't do a thing and everyone around me was proclaiming the ease and hype of microsoft (cheap bastards, taking the easy way out!) As time went on, I learned more about the ksh on ATT, and csh on BSD, and became pretty good. I was now at a point I could ask intelligent questions, but it took a lot of late nights, a lot of reading tech manuals, man pages, and keeping the case lid off the computer. Now I'm having a great time with the OS, and want to contribute to it. Un/fortunately as you stated before jumping gets in the way. :-) How about yourself? This message was created with 100% recycled electrons find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Thanks SkyBytch. Well said. One of the problems with running online forums is the attempted anonymous and obnoxious users. Its great to know that mature conversation is still protected. Stay cool. find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Everyone has something to learn from someone who knows more and everyone has something to teach to someone who knows less. The key is to seek mentorship when you're ready and to only advise when the student seeks your advice. Knowledge is obtained through experience and programming and system administration are learned through trial and error. Soon one finds themselves stumped on a problem that requires days of work before consulting an expert and either learning some key syntax or some serious theory at which point the novice has paid some real dues and graduates into a new level of knowledge. Always know and respect a mentor smarter than you, and always be willing to mentor an enthusiastic student. Never boast obnoxiously to those who try, only those who claim equal expertise without the knowledge or experience to back it up. ;-) You're exactly right about learning from gurus. I was fortunate enough to inherit a couple of key unix gurus in my life, I consult when I hit a brick wall. Typically I learn about the problems in the core OS bits and get a lesson in a part of the OS source I wouldn't have been able to teach myself for a long time. Although now I'm at a point where if I have a problem with the OS source I need to start fixing it myself. That's the problem with free software, you don't get to complain to the manufacturer, you don't get to call for support, it's your job to help the project. Its a really neat oppportunity and privelege the open source world provides. Now to figure out these damn stable bits... But seriously, its great that you're learning. What do you use? What's your take on the OS? C code. C code run. run code, run. please? -=Raistlin find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;

Caramon is dead. Although Margeret Weis (an aquantience) loves the name, Caramon was never very deep, and therefore relatively dull. Although he would be more likely to skydive. Skydiving is a beautiful form of relaxation which keeps one from going insane from work and other hobbies. I can't think about code in FF, although I'll be damned if I haven't tried. #include find / -name jumpers -print; cat jumpers $USER > manifest; cd /dev/airplane; more altitude; make jump; cd /pub; more beer;